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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (100383)	4/6/2005 10:45:26 AM
From: Bill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Authority is an accepted form of evidence. Subject matter experts are routinely used in news stories, court cases and many forms of communication. Appealing to authority as a rhetorical tool is only considered a logical fallacy if the requisite facts and logic are absent. Even then, the argument is not invalid, it's just incomplete.

To: cosmicforce who wrote (100383)	4/6/2005 10:52:50 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Appeal to authority is interesting, isn't it? Because some times authorities know more, and some times they only think they know more. In the end it comes down to testing the authorities to find out which authority is correct in a given instance- since it is often the case that we can find competing authorities on issues (and especially moral issues). When you come down to evaluating authorities on moral issues, we often resort to an underlying belief system in our evaluation- whether we know it or not.